


Who You Are Without Each Other

by daystarsearcher



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Gen, I just really wanted to write a story where Kai Winn and Quark are the heroes, Orb Experience, faith - Freeform, orbs, unlikely friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-30
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-19 02:37:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22470508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daystarsearcher/pseuds/daystarsearcher
Summary: Kai Winn will do anything to get rid of the false Emissary. Her actions will have more consequences than she could ever imagine.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 18





	Who You Are Without Each Other

**Author's Note:**

> Deep Space Nine is not my property; please don't sue me.
> 
> I discovered a draft of this in my documents earlier in 2019, and decided to finally finish it. Hope you enjoy!

Winn Adami’s left thumb slips below the right sleeve of her ceremonial robe as she enters the caverns. It sweeps along the scar there. She kept that scar, when the medics after the war would have taken it away with all the rest. She kept it as a reminder, invisible beneath the ceremonial robes of a vedek, that each moment of her life had been preordained by the Prophets. That each trial she faced had been necessary—each bite of scorn in the faces of the vedeks of the capitol, each rejection by Kai Opaka, even each beating meted out by the Cardassians…each had been the hammer blows of the Prophets at their forge, shaping her, strengthening her. 

She is the sword of her people. She is the Kai. 

It is regretful that the false Emissary must be dealt with in this way. But she did try to be reasonable. 

The cave is deep and dark as destiny, light flickering from dying torches on the ragged rock walls. A monk melts from the shadows, nods respectfully. She follows him into the labyrinth. 

She tries to keep track of the twists and turns, but it quickly lost. No matter, they are soon at the room. The monk makes a gesture of respect and backs away, seeming to merge with the shadows before he disappears.

The shattered remnants of the unknown Orb lie in a line on the altar, each no bigger than her thumb; it is obvious even at a glance that not all of the pieces are there. No doubt many were lost to Cardassian souvenir seekers; others may lie in the scattered graves of resistance fighters across the planet.

She reaches out, her finger brushing one piece lightly—

#

_“It is linear,” Opaka says. No, not long-banished Opaka—the eyes are flat, incurious. Cold._

_She is standing in her childhood home, before it burned. She had forgotten that spray of flowers over the lintel, her mother had always picked them fresh—_

_“It is corporeal,” Sisko says from behind her._

_“You!” she says, anger burning in her throat before she forces it back down. Not him, of course it is not the false Emissary. She sinks to her knees._

_“I beg pardon, Prophets, a thousand pardons—”_

_“You disturb us,” two voices at once, and then four, Opakas splitting into two Opakas, Sisko into two Siskos, the Prophet’s masks as fractured as their orb. “Why do you seek us?”_

_“I seek only to serve you—”_

_“Lies,” and there is only one of them now, Sisko. “They are diffuse. They are not linear.” He looks at her like she is an insect, and doubt pierces like a butterfly pin through her gut. Is she lying? To the Prophets, to herself?_

_But then the certainty, like the doors of the temple shutting behind her. Of course she is doing the right thing. She is the Kai._

_“I speak no lies,” she says, and her voice no longer shakes. “The one known as Sisko is the one who lied. The wormhole must never open. We must never be tempted to profane your temple, to let aliens look upon the faces of the gods.” She swallows, hard. “He is not your Emissary. He has only succeeded because others assist him. He has never had to stand alone, as—”_

_As she has._

_“You would have us remove a thread from a tapestry,” says the god wearing her enemy’s face. He toys with the tassels of her mother’s tapestry on the wall, a traditional mandala pattern. “Reweave the pattern of your lives. Is this truly your wish?”_

_Winn opens her mouth to accept--_

#

The bartender has bad dreams.

They all call him the bartender, a joke that stopped being funny a bare two hours of the shuttle flight from Terok Nor, or maybe it was never funny to begin with and he was only laughing with relief that he got out in time, before the Bajorans let all that freedom go to their heads and he got strung up on the space station’s railings with a dozen other unlucky souls that looked different enough to be called collaborators. The crew call him the bartender but he’s the ship’s cook really, the navigator in a pinch, a fighter in an even stronger pinch, though one that’s often needed. The Grand Nagus’ Pride is anything but, and the turnover rate is high. Some of them even have a chance to collect their pay before they collect a disrupter blast to the chest from the Klingons, the Romulans, the Orion Syndicate, or whatever power they’ve managed to annoy that week.

It’s a wonder he’s survived these seven years.

It’s no wonder he has bad dreams.

But the dreams themselves…

Terok Nor. Always Terok Nor. But a different name—Deep Space Nine—and a different him. Entanglements with Starfleet officers, though apparently his subconscious won’t let him escape Odo, who still patrols the Promenade as if even Starfleet couldn’t chip and pry him from his station. Others are familiar to Quark as well--his idiot brother as Grand Nagus, his addled nephew in an ensign’s uniform, both of them betraying everything that Ferengi stand for—

Though not in a holding cell. There is that, that in the dreams Nog is not rotting in a holding cell.

Bad dreams, and then one day, a raid on a Bajoran outpost, a few prisoners taken in the hope that one of the ragged refugees will be a vedek’s cousin, or the mistress of a high-profile politician in whatever faction’s in charge this week. Someone who will pay a ransom. A sucker’s bet; even a Bajor as rife with corruption as it is now doesn’t have the latinum to spare for sentimentality. Not with the Cardassians circling ever closer to their door.

Still it falls to the bartender--the cook and the sometimes navigator and the rare fighter and the dreamer of bad dreams--to see to their welfare. To keep them fed and bandaged and relatively clean. So he walks the halls of The Grand Nagus’ Pride grumbling the litany of complaints that have become the background radiation of his life, that he think he might even miss if he didn’t have, and steps into the brig, and one of the refugees turns to face him—

And the moba fruit falls from his hands as Quark sees a face from his nightmares.

“Winn Adami,” the prisoner says coldly to the bartender, nodding now to the padd where he is supposed to be cataloguing their personal information. “For all the good it may do you.”

#

_The dark-skinned human doesn’t quite smile. “It’s really quite simple, Quark. You’re not going to leave.”_

_This is the worst of his dreams, the calm self-assurance of the human, the way he ties Quark up in his words until he cannot move. The way he holds out hope in one hand while threat lies under the silk of his voice like a phaser beneath a dark robe, and tells him there was a way he could have saved his nephew; could have saved, by extension, his brother._

_“Not going to leave? But we’re packed and ready to go.”_

_“Unpack.”_

_One word. One word as if it could be so simple, to cast aside the threats and angry glances and the graffiti on his storefront—‘Aliens Go Home.’_

_One word, and he wavers on the edge of time, not knowing which way he will fall._

_“We need a community leader and it’s going to be you, Quark."_

_That smile, like the hara cat that caught the canary. He knows, he knows what a risk this is--_

_“I’ve made a career out of knowing when to leave, and this Bajorian provisional government is far too provisional for my taste. And when governments fall, people like me are lined up and shot.”_

_Did he say this? Did he really say this? For a moment he wavers in the dream, the words taste so familiar on his tongue…_

_But there was no Starfleet commander when Nog was arrested. A few officers, but none with this man’s imagination or authority, and Quark hadn’t stuck around to find out if Commander Riker was any different._

_“There is that risk but then you are a gambler, Quark…”_

_A gambler. What a laugh._

_Quark knows better than everyone that the house always wins._

_Sisko’s voice drips false sorrow. “You know, Quark, that poor kid is about to spend the best years of his life in a Bajoran prison.”_

Quark wakes, his hands fists at his side. His eyes wet.

Ah, too cruel, this dream. There is no profit in grief.

#

The leaves of the lilies are bruised, gripped too tightly in Benjamin Sisko’s hand as he carries them to the cemetery. He sets one on his wife’s grave; the other on Jake’s.

It has been seven years since his death. The counselors told him time would ease his pain.

The counselors were wrong.

He does not linger at the grave. There is no solace there.

There is no solace at his father’s restaurant, either, but there is something near to it: forgetting. Sitting in the back alley, peeling potatoes, he can start to bury the anger there, heaping up time and repetition around it.

Everywhere else the anger reaches him too easily. The slightest thing—a baseball, the sound of a young boy’s laughter, a picture of a solar sail in a history book—sets it loose and roaring for vengeance, fists clenched and swinging until they are battered and bloody and the doctors have come to take him away, again.

Let them take him. They cannot save him. They could not save Jake.

Maybe no one could have saved Jake. The plasma burns were severe. 

If he had just had someone to guide him—if someone more experienced had been training him in engineering—sometimes, Benjamin thinks he remembers asking someone more experienced to train him in engineering—

But he didn’t. It’s a false memory.

He hasn’t told the doctors about the memories. Or the voices. The voices are broken, and disjointed. They sound as though they are coming from under water, or far away. They ask where he is. They ask why he has not come. They ask what it means to arrive, what it means to have been. They ask why grief exists.

He thinks about trying to speak back, but they seem so far beyond his reach. His will to do anything more than he already does—visit the graves of his wife and son, peel potatoes in a back alley, fall into sleep and strange dreams—feels as though it has been bled out of him. Everything feels like it would take too much energy, Everything feels like an impossible weight that cannot be lifted.

It is all he can do to lift his own body, to rise from the bed each day to greet a bright sun that does not care about his loss of his wife, of his son, of his future.

#

_This is going to become a ghost town…_

The words echo in Quark’s head in his own voice. A memory of something left unfinished. He shakes them away, stares into the eyes of the older Bajoran woman. They are ice.

“Winn Adami,” he says with a confidence he doesn’t feel. He looks back down at the padd, just to scan her data. Not to avoid her eyes. This isn’t the woman from his nightmares. It’s not possible. “Well, this is a checkered career. Some early political success when you helped the Circle drive the Federation off Bajor, but when the Great Famine began everyone started remembering their aid programs and you weren’t nearly so popular then, were you?”

Silence. It throws Quark a little; this is the part where they usually start begging or threatening. “The Vedek Assembly wouldn’t take you back if we paid them. Not unless it was to string you up from the nearest post.”

A rustle of fabric; he makes the mistake of looking back up. Her gaze is disdain as cutting as a phaser. “Well, then. You might as well let me go.”

“Let’s not be so hasty now.” He licks his lips, a nervous tic; he can tell from the revulsion that twists her face that she takes it for lasciviousness. He tries to play into that; he is supposed to be the captor, after all, the one with an upper hand in whatever bargain there is to be struck. He’s not going to be thrown by a passing similarity to some half-remembered hallucination. “You had some kind of entanglement with the First Minister too, didn’t you? Pushed him into treaty negotiations where he got ambushed? He might pay us to drop you somewhere a little less convenient—the Klingon border, maybe? Cardassia Prime?” He affects a leer. “I’m sure the Cardassians will want to show you some…hospitality.”

She glares, so fierce he backs up a step. 

It is only the fierceness of the glare. It is not the familiarity.

He has never seen her before. Never, never, not even once. Sentient minds seek patterns. That’s all.

“They warned me about you,” she says.

So, they’re getting a reputation. Well, free publicity is good up to a point. Quark generally finds that point located on an angry Klingon’s bat’leth.

“I’ve seen you before.”

Quark’s heart stops. “You have the dreams too?” he blurts before he call back the words.

Something new in her face, then: shock. She covers it; it is gone in half a micro-span. But it was there.

Quark does not want to believe that someone else has had the dreams. That would mean…

At the same time, what a relief. If he could speak of it.

“Do you see…?” he begins cautiously.

“Others?” Winn answers after a long pause. Her face has shut as hard as an emergency bulkhead, and he knows his has done the same. Two grifters, knowing all the tricks of the trade, unwilling to give an inch and be taken for a light-year. Knowing at the same time there is no profit without risk:

“Yes.”

#

_Kira Nerys is iron and fire; she is young and foolish and strident. Adami should ignore this barely-woman, a passing fancy of Vedek Bareil’s, a puppet of the false Emissary._

_“In time you will learn I am not your enemy…”_

_But the fool was never interested in learning from the past._

_“It was all to get him here, wasn’t it? The school, the protest, the bombing. You knew that would get him out of the monastery. You did it all to kill him—to stop him from becoming Kai.”_

_But that was never how she tried to get rid of Bareil—it was the negotiations, the information she passed to the Cardassians, who couldn’t even execute a damned ambush properly or scrub the evidence of their transactions from their onboard computers. And she did it for the good of Bajor, everything she has ever done has been for the good of—_

_Adami looks into dream Nerys’ naïve brown eyes—how had she kept that naivete? Had she never been chained, beaten, whipped as Adami had? What was in her that kept her soul like a fire, her spine like iron? What let her hold her betters in such contempt?_

_In the dream she barely remembers the real Nerys. So eager to learn, so true in her faith—and her faith was Winn Adami even and above the Prophets, there was no one more loyal…_

In her waking hours, she remembers the dream. If Winn Adami still believed in the Prophets herself, she would rail against them for this fresh pain. Instead, she rails against her own heart for this decade-old memory of a confused adolescent she mentored and molded. How can she believe Nerys would ever turn against her? 

Every morning she wakes with the bitter taste of knowledge that some part of her believes that even this, the closest thing she has ever had to love, has been a lie.

#

“Move! Move!”

Kira Nerys gestures angrily with her new phaser rifle, the weight of it cutting into her shoulder and casting jagged shadows on the cave wall opposite, where the symbol of The Circle has been scrawled in paint red as blood. There is blood on her hands, human and Bajoran both. She couldn’t have let the collaborator sound the alarm. 

She had made sure the alien was dead.

The other resistance fighters of her cell hustle the boxes of smuggled weapons at an increased pace; they have learned quickly that despite her novice’s robe, she is no one to anger. It only took one execution this time. 

Kira Nerys does not tolerate incompetence, or consorting with the enemy. Anything that slows their goal is incompetence, and anyone not in this cave is the enemy now, no matter what they did against the Cardassians during the Occupation. She learned that much in her month of service aboard Terok Nor, before she was cashiered out of the military for speaking too often the simple truth that the Federation couldn’t be trusted.

The corrupt provisional government isn’t nearly provisional enough for her tastes. But she’s working on it.

A girl, barely fourteen, stumbles under the weight of her load at the back of the line. Kira glares, and the girl picks up the pace.

Not bad, but Kira knows it will not be enough. The girl is too young, too soft. Revolution is a hungrier god than the Prophets, and one day all too soon it will take her body between its jaws and snap her neck without a second’s pause. Kira Nerys will have no time to mourn her. 

If she begins mourning, she will never stop. 

Rage is better.

Kira steps into the next cave, and her only warning is the reflected flash off light off the muzzles of the disruptors before the Federation’s Klingon allies open fire.

#

Adami is attempting to meditate when the barkeep comes back to her cell.

He wants something; she can tell instantly from his sidling mince up to the force field, his overly chipper hello. 

“Decided I might be useful after all?”

“Just killing time,” he says unconvincingly. This one didn’t miss his calling for the stage. “Just curious about…a few things.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Such as?”

“Such as what you were doing so close to the Cardassian border when we picked you up.”

Her first instinct is to lie. Unlike this alien, she is good at it. 

But there is something in the shift of his feet. A hidden desperation that feels too familiar.

Something in his face that is more familiar still, and it does not merit trust, she knows this, but it merits…something.

“Have you heard of the Orb of Connection?” she asks.

“Is it valuable?” he asks sarcastically. As well he should, of an artifact of interest only to a pack of refugees turning on each other like starving hara cats, and a band of oppressors who’d buy a vase someone else wanted just to smash it.

Winn snorts. “It’s not even an orb. None of them are. Have you ever noticed that? They’re a completely different shape.” She shakes her head, hearing her voice bitter as hasperat and not nearly so satisfying. “Superstition. No wonder we can’t stop killing each other. We all think the hand of the Prophets will reach down and save us.” Her ragged laugh hurts her throat. “It took me most of my life to realize that it wasn’t.”

“Then why were you there?” the barkeep asks. “If you don’t believe?”

She shrugs. “As I told you.” The vision of Nerys dances before her eyes, so real for a second that the breath catches in her throat. “The dreams. I kept having the dreams.”

#

_Odo looms tall in his dreams, immovable as stone. Sometimes he is stone. Sometimes he is liquid, shining like rose gold. Once, he is a bird soaring over the Promenade._

_Sometimes he is almost ash, his skin blackening and peeling away as he tries to harangue Quark one last time._

_He is stone, but his eyes are sad, or his mouth quirks in a rare smile._

_It quirks most often when he is foiling Quark—there are so many dreams where he foils Quark that it all blurs together when he awakens: a petty robbery here, a plan to advertise through station monitors there. An illegal vole-fighting ring, a massive smuggling operation._

_“You’ll miss me,” he says to stone man in the corridor. He means ‘I’ll miss you.’_

Why does he care? The dreams never explain. Odo should be—is—was—his enemy. 

_Shivering his way up the mountainside, his nemesis no longer stone nor liquid, only fragile. Just a little higher…just a little higher…_

There is no truth to this. There is no nobility to him. 

No matter how different he might be in another life, there is no profit in such a friendship. 

# 

Odo doesn’t care. 

He remembers caring, once. He remembers caring deeply. He would reach out with all his senses, ignoring the searing pain of the electrical shock, desperate to see if Dr. Mora’s face were creased in a frown or stretched in a smile. 

He remembers how the frown hurt more than any other punishment his father could devise. 

He remembers when he starting trying to hide it, keeping his face as expressionless as possible, stifling the movements of his borrowed form. It was so much safer when they thought you didn’t feel. 

He doesn’t remember when he stopping caring entirely. 

Mora is dead. He survived the entire Occupation only to die two months after the Federation abandoned them. 

Odo had not been there. 

It had seemed so important, to get out of Mora’s grasp. He had wanted it almost as much as he wanted the smile. And since he couldn’t get the scientist’s approval, he had fought for the next best thing, which had been freedom. He had cared so much then—worked so hard to gain the trust of the workers and the overseers in the mining camps, to be valued by them as an impartial voice. Worked so hard then on Terok Nor, to find the truth, to deliver justice. 

He had let Mora persuade him to come back for a visit. Just for a few days. Only because Mora had asked, not demanded. 

Only because Mora had said he was proud, and Mora was still the only one who had ever said that. 

Days turned into weeks. Mora begged him to stay; he had so many more tests to run. But the walls of the laboratory were starting to feel like a cage again, and he had another duty, or at least a convenient excuse: his job. 

He had cared so much about his job once. It had filled his entire world, made up his entire definition of self. He was the Constable. He imposed order. He kept everyone safe. 

Mora died in a raid by an extremist group the day after he left. 

He doesn’t remember what he did to the members of that group he could find. 

Did he grieve? He thinks he remembers grief. 

He is no longer in the lab. He is in a much more secure location now. There is no way he could leave even if they were disposed to let him. 

He no longer cares that he is locked in a room with no windows. He no longer cares that there are no shapes for him to practice, that it is so longer since he has seen a humanoid face that his own is no longer symmetrical, that there is nothing to do but form and reform and stare at the wall, that time passes without meaning beyond the need to regenerate, that even that understanding of time disappears when he lets himself coagulate on the floor of his cell, unable to die in the safe and sterile environment in which he has been contained. 

He is a prisoner. 

He has trained himself very carefully to feel absolutely nothing about that fact. 

_#_

“So you think they’re real too,” Winn says. 

“Nonsense,” Quark says automatically. He clings to that word like a lifeline. “You Bajorans. I’ll never understand you. Even the atheists have superstitions.” 

“Sometimes you don’t have to understand,” Winn says, some of that portentous tone she must have used in her old religious life seeping into her voice. “Sometimes you just have to know.” 

“Even if what you’re saying is true—” Quark is starting to squawk, his hands flapping—“Things were terrible there. There was a war! People died! You were—” 

And Quark pauses, because in the cold light of day he can’t remember exactly what Winn Adami was, only that she was different than she is here, now. That light in her eyes, it was colder. That smile less sardonic, more like a knife in a velvet glove. 

“You were different,” he finishes lamely. He hurries on; in for a latinum slip, in for a bar: “And my fortunes would be gone—trapped on a Federation station, having to abide by their rules, never able to turn a consistent profit—” 

“But Rom would be alive,” Winn says. 

And Quark jumps. 

He has never told her his brother’s name. 

# 

_It should be a nightmare, an unfunny masquerade: Nog swaggering across the bridge of a Starfleet ship in a cadet’s uniform; Rom bedecked in the robes of the Grand Nagus but still wearing the Bajoran earring he took to please his uppity wife—and no money from that dowry, their father would be turning in his grave and Moogie should have at least threatened to withhold her blessing—the cane gripped tight in his foolish hands that will spill and spill and spill latinum and rights until women walk clothed in the streets and the economy crumbles like imported crackers in Ferenginar rain._

_It should be a nightmare, but he is too happy to see them._

_Even in dreams, he remembers that Rom should be dead, and Nog just as lost to him._

_“That poor kid is about to spend the best years of his life…”_

_Running around the station with the commander’s son. Playing pranks with fleas that turn customers on the Promenade all the colors of the rainbow. Going on double dates where he drinks root beer and learns baseball. Donning a cadet’s uniform, and looking up with eagerness into the eyes of a big pink human, the Chief’s slow patient voice expounding on isolinear chips and coolant systems. He learned this hero worship from his useless father: Rom nattering on cheerfully about waste extraction as if the inhabitants of the station were evacuating latinum from their bowels, Rom rejecting perfectly good beetles and grubs in favor of mammal fat and avian fetuses for breakfast just because it was what “the Chief” ate._

_The Chief was all right. Never fixed the replicator fast enough, but made up for it in the latinum he spent on the holosuites with Bashir, and the crowds he drew with his darts matches. Fed Rom a lot of nonsense about unions, but at the end of the day…he was all right._

_Chief O’Brien raises a mug of ale, and Quark hustles to refill it._

_If only all the dreams were like this, so simple._

__If only he could stay in this moment forever._ _

__

__

# 

O’Brien wakes up to the screech of the perimeter alarms, the taste of ale from the wake gone sour in his mouth. He rolls out of his bed, his phaser already in his hand, runs to his positions. The bodies of his fellow Maquis are stark shadow against the night. Fewer than there were the night before. The damn spoonheads saw to that. 

Disrupter blasts split the night air, screams so familiar O’Brien almost doesn’t hear them. He’s already firing back, his arm propped against half-blasted-away brick and mortar that a distant part of his mind recognizes as a house he built long ago, when he still thought he could start over. 

A scream from several feet away—he’s winged one! O’Brien fires again on instinct and the scream is cut short. A young Cardassian falls from the window of the building opposite. Her body makes a crunch on impact that can be heard even over the phaser and disrupter fire like arcs like shooting stars across the dirt road of yet another planet abandoned by the Federation. 

The weapons fire is bright enough that he can see her face. She’s young. Couldn’t be more than nineteen. Dark hair, long and straight and done up in braids like Keiko used to do with— 

A disrupter blast sheers away half of O’Brien’s cover and he rolls away with a grunted curse, smacks right into a corpse. Human this time. No, he takes in the nose: Bajoran. 

It was Bajor that opened his eyes, after they drove off the Federation. And why shouldn’t they have? Damned Federation couldn’t even protect its own colonists from the spoonheads, what the hell did they think they could do for Bajor? And it had haunted him, what he had seen when he’d gone planetside, the way the Cardassians had gouged opened the earth, cracked it like an egg to eat and left the shell behind, tended by wounded and dazed refugees of a once-thriving world. 

Keiko hadn’t seen. He didn’t blame her; she was a botanist, she was taught to treasure life. And it hadn’t helped how angry he had become, how the words to describe all the atrocities he had seen seemed to block up the back of his throat until it was impossible to speak them, until they festered inside him like growing fires and the only way he could communicate the horror was with his fists against the bulkhead… 

He didn’t blame her for leaving with Molly. 

He blamed the Cardassians. 

He sees a weakness now in their attack pattern; they’ve drawn too close to the generator. He knows exactly what weak spot to aim at. 

The explosion evaporates one, and sends five bodies flying. 

He remembers vaguely, through the ringing of his ears as ash settles over the battlefield, that he once fixed things instead of tearing them apart. 

# 

“He agreed.” Quark darts his eyes to the side to make sure that the cameras are still down. His nails are bitten to the quick. “That part was easy. Getting permission from the planetary governor for the meeting place was the hard part. Not to mention finding someone who was willing to pay more than three expired holosuite coupons for you.” 

The Bajoran leans back against the wall, her only concession to her relief. Her eyes are still hooded, wary. “Not bad,” she says slowly. “As long as you can find the caves…” 

“I can find the caves!” Quark snaps. “Limestone formation, six to seven caverns, unusual concentration of tachyons. I could do the geological scan in my sleep.” 

If, of course, the caves are there. That is what this is all hinging on. That the scrolls Winn Adami found were a true and accurate history of the Vedek who secreted the Orb of Connection, and not a piece of fiction accidentally misfiled in a resettlement camp library of the few tomes refugees had managed to grab as they fled Bajor. 

Just thinking about it is giving Quark heart palpitations. 

“I found the ingredients for this in the storage room,” he says gruffly. Shoves the foil-wrapped package towards the prisoner with his foot. “It was going to go bad, and then you’d be eating into our rations, eating us out of house and home when you’re not going to bring in any income…” 

Winn picks up the package and unwraps it, revealing an inexpert hasperat. 

She regards this as if it is just one more puzzling thing about Quark in a long list, and lifts her eyes to his. Her eyes have always been the grey of unbending steel and untroubled water. “Why are you doing this?” 

He knows she is talking about more than the hasperat. 

He wishes he had an answer for her. 

In the dreams—the people he would have met—the people he would have known—the people he would have— 

The person he would have been— 

“Because—“ 

He cannot say the words. No Ferengi should ever say those words; no Ferengi should ever even feel them riot at the back of his throat like a jostling crowd eager to push through: 

__I want to be a better person—_ _

No Ferengi should care. 

“Hey, your gods are all powerful, right?” he cracks. “Maybe they can see their way to providing me with some latinum across time and space.” 

# 

“Oh, is this all you brought out to play?” Julian drawls, surveying the spread of latinum bars before him. He props his feet up on the table, grins in what he is reasonably sure, after practicing in the mirror for a few hours, is a rakish manner. “I thought this was a serious game.” 

“Bashir,” hisses Lt. Kitz from his left. Her normally lovely face is drawn tight with worry, probably due to all the disruptors in the room, and the fact that the guards checked their phasers at the door. And maybe also the fact that what he told her would be a five minute diversion from their away mission objective has now stretched past three hours. “What the hell are you doing?” 

“Winning,” Bashir says with a dashing smile. 

Lt. Kitz scowls at him. 

Well, he thought it was dashing. 

The problem is that none of his coworkers have a sense of perspective. 

Julian may not have got everything he wanted from his blessedly brief tour of duty of duty on Deep Space Nine, but one thing he did get was a sense of perspective. And that sense told him that all the grand intentions in the world didn’t matter against a sudden hull breach or a booby-trapped warp core or a jagged knife in the hands of a child, or any of the other favorite tricks of the Bajoran resistance to freeze or burn or shred a humanoid body. Everyone, in the end, was just so much anatomy and physiology, full of frailties and weak points, a walking tentative peace of blood and bones and tendons waiting to be ripped apart. 

Everyone, in the end, died. No matter how hard you tried to save them. 

So you might as well have a bit of fun with how much cleverer you were than everyone else before you had to shuffle off the mortal coil. 

He’d decided, after that bloody abrupt end to his tour of duty aboard Deep Space Nine, that he’d had more than enough of the frontier—at least he messy parts where you had to stick around. Better to be the hero of the day for an improvised vaccine or pretty bit of surgery, receive all the adulation, kiss a lovely life-form or two and then sweep off before inevitably, people began to ask difficult questions about what the increased lifespan would mean for their economy or whether they would be able to sustain harvests for the nutritional levels you’d told them they’d need. Not to mention, start to make cutting remarks about your wandering hands or your “annoying” laugh. 

He is not lonely. 

He throws out a card, and remembers, a microspan too late, that he had thrown out that same card two rounds ago. Lt. Kitz hisses under her breath, her hand flying towards where her phaser no longer is as the guards draw in around them like boulders settling into place. Time seems to slow down as they pull their disrupters from their belts, the red lights of the casino glaring off the barrels. 

Julian laughs one last time, and it sounds strange to his ears: wild, despairing. He is rising, he is throwing himself in front of Lt. Kitz, but time has slowed to a crawl, and he can already tell it was, as always, too little, too late. 

He wishes he could say that it had been fun. 

# 

She is shoved forward. Winn grimaces as the sharp rocks of the caves bite into her knees. The Cardassian must see her, because from the darkness comes a low, throaty chuckle. 

She cannot see him, lurking in the shadows, but she has never forgotten the way Cardassians laugh at the sight of pain. 

“Gul,” her conspirator says from beside her, his voice so obsequious she almost recoils. A little shake under the fawning, but even that doesn’t quiet her nerves. He could be just as nervous about betraying her as what they originally planned to do. 

And she is manacled, on her knees, helpless. 

This is one of those times where it would be helpful if she still prayed. 

“The bartender!” A cold, ironical amusement colors the words, not quite masked by their playful lilt. When he speaks next, it is several feet to the left of where he last was; she never heard his footsteps. “Winn Adami. Quite a niche collector’s item, Quark. So intriguing; you usually don’t take the effort to contact buyers with more…esoteric interests.” 

His voice softens towards the end of his sentence as if smoothing down silk, but Winn still hears the sharpening of a blade. 

Playful, but no fool, to keep himself masked in darkness so they cannot pinpoint his position. 

“Diversification is the key to a strong financial portfolio,” Quark blusters. 

“Indeed,” and suddenly he is inches from her face, wide blue eyes startling against reptilian brow ridges. He smiles, self-satisfied, arch verging into manic. “Oh dear, the years have used you hard, haven’t they?” 

She surges up to head-butt him— 

And he is not there. 

She crashes through the hologram into the wall, the blow it like a full-body shock, like the lights going out. She crumples to the ground. 

“Quark, Quark, Quark.” The amusement is a mask, the slight boredom threaded through it a mask as well. Winn can hear this even through the ringing in the ears; taste his insincerity even through the blood in her mouth. “Piracy has made you dreadfully unsubtle. Or were you always like this? There are remedial programs you could go to, you know.” 

Quark’s voice sounds like he has backed up a good ten feet; she hears his feet shuffling against the gravel. “I—I have no idea what you mean, I’m a businessman—” 

“As am I, in a sense,” the Cardassian says. “Strange, isn’t it, the habits that persist from the petty trades? Even now, when I should be free of such things, I do still like to tie up loose threads.” A self-deprecating laugh. “And Ferengi are so predictable. If I’m interested, you’re certain you can make a play for a counteroffer to Central Command—after pocketing my payment, of course.” The voice is coming closer and closer to Winn; this time she hears the footsteps. Why not? She cannot hurt anyone right now. “Try not to do it again, Quark. You have some slight use beyond your entertainment value.” 

“You’re—” a dry, rasping swallow--“letting me go?” 

“I have so few business partners who can make me laugh,” says the Cardassian, right in front of Winn now. It is really him and not a hologram; she can see the dust stirred up by his feet. Not that she can do anything with that information, winded and with her erstwhile ally backing away from her, always so greedy not least with his life and who was she to judge him for doing what was only sensible—she had come here on a half a dream— 

The Cardassian’s scaled hand gripped her hair tight. “Now, my dear,” he said. “I hate to be rude, but we really must get—” 

The disruptor blast hits him square in the chest. 

His eyes widen; the whites of them blinding. “So you can—surprise me—after all—” 

He pitches forward onto the dirt. 

Quark spits. “He always has to have the last word.” 

Winn struggles to her feet, her hair hanging in disarray over her face, her breath still catching and scraping in her lungs. “You didn’t betray me…why?” 

“Shut up, we don’t have much time.” He passes a water bottle to her anyway before pulling out his tricorder. “His guards will be here any minute. He’s got to have it cached here somewhere.” 

Winn pulls out her own tricorder, the numbers swimming before her eyes. This has never been her skill at the best of times. And this is certainly far from that. 

She must have faith that the orb is here. 

But even that is a skill she has long let rust and weaken. 

# 

_She dreams a tall alien, spots disappearing in a trail that dives below the hood of a vedek’s robes—blasphemy, if she still cared for such things. In the moment of the dream she finds herself arrested by the woman’s eyes, which hold not only history beyond anything Adami could ever remember, but a touch of mischief. The woman scans her with a tricorder._

_“Do I know you?” she asks the woman._

_“Do you?” the woman mirrors back, lips quirking in a smile. “I meet a lot of people. Not always in the same lifetime.”_

_“Are you a Prophet?” she asks, knowing as she asks that this is not the answer._

_The woman—woman?—only smiles at her like she knows all the secrets in the universe, and can’t wait to find out all those of the next. “You should really get to know people better before you resurrect them.”_

_She—she?—walks away with a flirtatious wink, and Adami feels the Ferengi step into place at her side, looking wistfully after her._

_“Is this_ your _dream then?” she asks him._

 _He shrugs, resigned. “I think I had a lot of dreams about her. I don’t know if I ever really knew her.” He rubs his forehead tiredly. “I think she was my best friend.”  
_

# 

Verad Dax tries to stand, and crumples to the floor. 

“I don’t need help!” he snarls at Mareel. Once those words would have hit her like the lash of a whip; now, her face is stone. She turns back to the screen, where the Jem’Hadar ships have encircled them. 

It’s true, he doesn’t need her help. He’s beyond all help. This ambush is just the icing on the cake. _Icing on the cake_ —an Earth expression, he remembers distantly. All humans, or just the ones who liked cooking like Benjamin’s father…? 

“We are not Federation spies,” Mareel is still insisting over voice communication, even though the jarring buzz she gets in reply shows that the Dominion is still jamming all her signals. “We are simply travelers—” 

Nothing simple about their lives now. Always a race, always a scavenger hunt, to the next port of call with some doctor who can be bought or blackmailed to find the next stopgap—a serum to slow down rejection, tranquilizers to block out the voices of the dead that keen and wail and argue with each other louder every day, talk therapy where he insists that there is no reason for guilt, Jadzia isn’t dead, she lives on in him, it should always have been him, the universe aligned to leave her alone and unprotected and deliver her to him on a silver platter— 

Another wave of pain hits him as sharp as razorworm teeth—it feels almost as if the symbiont has started to _devour_ him—and Mareel spares him one look that almost holds the remains of tender concern, just as the beams of light burst forth from the Jem’Hadar ships. He had, he thinks in those last fractions of a moment, a good life. The life he deserved. 

He got everything he thought he ever wanted. 

# 

“Dig faster!” Winn yells, returning a disruptor blast. The guards have arrived and are supplemented by Quark’s crew, who have unfortunately proved more perceptive than Quark would have guessed. 

“I’m sorry, would you like a turn?” Quark has to below over the energy bolts and crash of falling stalactites. “Because anytime—” 

“It’s a cave!” Winn bellows. “It’s not a dropped slip of latinum or a lapel pin, you shouldn’t be able to miss it—” 

And there it is on Quark’s sensors, suddenly revealed when he took a step to the left and the imperfect magnetic shielding of the iron-nickel alloy gapped open: a cave, and some kind of power signature beyond. He sets his disruptor to maximum and there is a great explosion, louder even than he would have guessed, as the wall in front of him sprays gravel and then melts away into a hole, the edges glowing red. He turns triumphantly to Winn, and she smiles— 

And a disruptor blast drives her directly into his arms. 

The rocks crash down behind her, and a distant part of Quark’s brain notes that this will buy them three minutes at least as he crashes to the floor under her weight. 

A trickle of blood winds down her forehead, cutting a track through the rock dust that makes her as pale as a ghost. But no—that is the light, from the orb on the pedestal where Garak had hidden it, illuminating her face as if she already has one foot in the heavens. Her eyes find it, and then beneath her, Quark. 

She smiles. It is the only smile she has given him that has ever looked real. 

“What strange friends the Prophets send us,” she says. 

And dies. 

“No!” Quark’s grief, only one small part greater than his fear, propels him to his feet, Adami’s body hitting the dust with a sickening liquid thud. “You have to help me! These are your gods! I don’t have a clue what I’m doing!” 

The sound of disruptors through the earthen wall is coming so fast it sounds like hysterical laughter. 

“Please,” Quark says, this time not to her body but to the box on the pedestal—shattered, he sees now with a heart that sinks like it’s coated in lead, not just the box but the orb inside it, a thousand glowing green pieces more numerous than false hopes and broken promises. By rockfall, phaser blasts, by eons of time before he and Adami entered this cavern with their foolish plan? Barely a plan, more a collision, two wrecked crafts careening off course propelled by some profitless, altruistic, suicidal-- 

Well. He’s come this far. 

Quark reaches out to touch a fragment— 

_#_

_“It is linear,” says Odo, circling him._

_“Corporeal,” says Adami. She stands tall, despite the disruptor burn that has charred her robes over her chest._

_“Acquisitive, adversarial,” says Rom, with that stupid giggle so like himself that Quark jerks away from him. The movement seems to jerk the world with it—he is no longer standing in the cave, but his bar on Terok Nor._

_“The tapestry unravels,” calls down Gul Garak from one of the upper levels, arm-in-arm with Adami and with a disruptor-charred uniform to match. “Only one string was pulled, and yet…”_

_“Yeah, well, that’s why I’m here,” says Quark. “It’s unraveling. It’s not right. You and I—” he looks up at Adami—“we knew, we could tell—”_

_“Not I,” says the Bajoran—but no, it’s not a Bajoran, is it? No more than the figure beside her is a Cardassian. “We take the forms of things you understand.”_

_“The tapestry was unwoven by demand,” says another Cardassian, the twin of Gul Garak but dressed instead in a fashionable suit. “It is still linear. Why should it be rewoven?”_

_Quark opens his mouth to speak, and finds himself in another part of his old bar, standing over a spinning dabo wheel. A hand claps down on his shoulder. “A risk, and then you are a gambler, Quark.”_

_Sisko smiles down at him, and then a frown creases his brow. “Quark?”_

_“You’re different,” Quark realizes. “You’re here. You’re partway here.”_

_But Sisko is shaking his head. “No. No, I’m in a restaurant in New Orleans. I never went to Deep Space Nine.”_

_A young boy flicker in and out of existence at his side: “Dad?” he asks. His mouth opens again to form the word, but only silence comes forth. Then, then a communications relay switched on: “Dad?” Then he winks out of sight._

_Sisko howls._

_Quark backs away, bumping into—_

_\--himself._

_“Linear,” he hears his own voice say, with the inflection he gives to deciding whether or not a piece of gold-pressed latinum is worth the risk. “Linearity implies choice. Choice implies loss. You walk down a path you cannot retrace.”_

_“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” Quark blusters. “You can always retrace a path! That’s what a path is!”_

_“The path diverges,” says a beautiful woman with spots spilling down her neck and legs like a shower of coins. “What will you acquire?”_

_“Lives or latinum?” Rom says, that giggle again._

_Quark’s knees are weak. “Can’t I have both?”_

_The three turn as one to stare at him, eyes as cold as space._

_“Hey, just asking, just asking,” Quark says, backing up nervously. “No harm in asking, never bargained with gods before, wouldn’t want to leave anything on the table—”_

_“Choose,” says the beautiful woman, and they are standing on the bridge of The Grand Nagus’ Pride, surrounded by naked woman and bars of latinum, and he knows that this is what awaits him if he chooses to go back, he can spin the disaster with Adami and the dead Cardassian into a cover story that will gain him riches beyond the wildest dreams of avarice—_

_“Choose,” says Rom, and they are standing back in the bar of Deep Space Nine, and Odo is smirking as he confiscates Quark’s property, and behind him Quark sees Sisko and Nog and a dozen others whose names he suddenly knows: Jake, Bashir, Jadzia, Nerys, Miles, Keiko, Molly…_

_“Choose!” says the wormhole alien wearing the dead body of Winn Adami._

_He makes his choice._

# 

_“Am I dead?” she asks._

_“A linear question,” says her reflection._

_She looks out onto a long Terok Nor promenade, sees Quark on his knees._

_“He begged us to give you this choice,” the her who is not her says, no inflection on any of the words. “To show you what you will become.”_

_And then she does._

_It is bitter as vinegar._

_“But Bajor,” Adami says, desperate, trying not to feel herself falling into the fire, trying not to hear all the saccharine lies that she wrapped around herself years before that until she could not have strayed from the course she lashed herself to with all the strength of the heroes of the old epics. “Is Bajor—”_

_She is shown that too._

_The fields so green, reclaimed from the harsh chemicals. The buildings rebuilt from smoking ruin. Children running and playing, none of them starved to the bone or missing hands from Cardassian discipline. A fleet of ships, rising to meet a glowing star in the sky—_

_reborn, in spite of her._

_“Turn it back,” she says, gritting her teeth against the tears she will not allow to fall, no, not even in front of her god. Especially in front of her god, who asks this sacrifice of her. “Turn me back, turn it all back!”_

_“You will give it all up?” Her own voice, sounding curious yet detached. “You will give yourself up?”_

_As if it cannot believe it, it shows her again: the Kai’s headdress, and beneath it that terrible smile, as if she wants to sink her teeth into the neck of the world; the self-delusion she wraps herself in like a fine cloak as her hands grasp for whatever power she can snatch, as if power were a set of shining rings to wear on her fingers and stroke in gloating contentment…_

_The fire..._

_“Is there no other way?” she whispers._

_“Threads in a tapestry do not all run the same direction,” says the Prophet._

_Winn Adami closes her eyes slowly, and nods. This is who she has to be if the rest is to come about._

_She opens her eyes._

_“Oh my Prophets,” she breathes out. This is what they ask. A return of faith. “I do not understand.” Another breath. “But I trust._

_“This time, I trust._

_“Make them who they were when they had each other.”_

# 

Kai Winn staggers, catching herself on the wall of the cave. Her head swims with what feels like a thousand lifetimes rushing out of her, and she stumbles again, grabbing onto the altar. A shard of the orb pricks her palm, and a voice stabs through the haze of disappearing memories-- _oh my Prophets, I trust, I trust_ and for some reason she thinks suddenly of that odious bartender— 

A monk rushes to her side, supports her arm as he dabs gently as the blood welling up from her skin. 

“Did it work?” she asks. Her tongue feels thick in her mouth. She feels as though she has been shouting, but she cannot remember what. Her heart aches beneath her ribcage, her lungs burning. The last thing she remembers is the Prophets asking if she wished the Emissary back—no, if she wished the Emissary gone—yes, she wanted him gone— 

She had opened her mouth to— 

“Did it work?” she asks again. The Emissary. Yes. Bajor must be rid of the false Emissary. 

“I am afraid I cannot say,” the monk states mildly. “You did not share your plans with our order before consulting our orb.” 

She bristled, pushed him away. “The space station—” she hesitates over the name, should she call it Terok Nor, see how he will react?—“up in the space station, are they—” 

“There has been no unusual activity on Deep Space Nine as far as I am aware,” the monk says. “Of course, we are a secluded order. If you wish to use my office to call Commander Sisko—”  
Kai Winn’s howl of rage echoes throughout the caverns, and she brings down her fist, smashing one shard of the orb into glowing dust. 

# 

There is a communiqué waiting for her when she returns to her apartments. It is from, of all people, the bartender. 

He shifts uneasily on his screen. “I…well. I don’t know…not that I need an excuse to call. Never hurts to cultivate friends in high places!” He laughs as if he is trying to convince himself. “I thought…well. I thought something happened. But nothing happened. You’re all right. Of course you’re all right. 

“Anyway. There’s an old Bajoran brandy back in the storeroom, if you’re ever disposed to stop in.” 

It’s the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard. She barely remembers the venal man; if she’d had her way he and all the other aliens would have been kicked off Deep Space Nine long ago. This is clearly a bribe, if the clumsiest one she has ever seen, and she should erase the message immediately. 

She doesn’t. 

She has no idea why. 

Nor does she know why the anger has cooled so quickly in her chest at today’s failed experiment, the lingering disappointment little more than pro forma. Why she feels almost…relieved. 

Kai Winn stares out her window at the night sky where hang the stars and the space station she wanted to destroy and the Celestial Temple, and then she goes to her bed. 

And if she has nightmares, of another way things might have been, of another life and death that might have been hers, of a foolish waste that another person might have called nobility— 

If she does, then they are only dreams. 

When she rises in the morning she will be the Kai, and she must lead her people. 


End file.
